Start Code 2024

I joined the Start Code hackathon in 2024 with four other people, and the interesting part was that we split up almost immediately. The other four were cybernetics students and started building a simulator of heat and electricity usage in a modern house, which was well outside what I do, so I went off and built a dashboard and network system for accessing smart electricity meters in different locations.

What I ended up with was a system that automatically deployed the Raspberry Pis with the correct configuration and WireGuard setup, so they could connect back to a VPS. Adding a new device generated its own nginx entry, so the device was reachable from the web server straight away. The setup worked well, we could poll Prometheus data from every Pi, and onboarding more devices was clean and quick.

Both of our solutions came close to winning, taking second and third place. That is something I am proud of, since I did my half solo. A great hackathon, a lot of cool people, and I made good friends with some of the other participants.